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Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Announcing The Socaltech 50: Southern California's Up-and-Comers

We're proud to announce the Socaltech 50, our list of the 50, up-and-coming people in Southern California's technology ecosystem. Getting to this list was not easy: we received over 700 nominations for people to be considered on the list, and it took a lot of work by our selection committee to whittle down the list to the finalists. Our selection committee -- which included Marc Averitt (Okapi Venture Capital), Barbara Bry (Blackbird Ventures, founder of Proflowers), Amanda Coolong (TechZulu), Peter Delgrosso (D&B Credibility, formerly of Web.com, United Online), John Greathouse (Rincon Venture Partners, formerly at ExpertCity, CallWave), Matthew Jenusaitis (OCTANe), Mike Jones
(Science, Inc, former CEO of MySpace), Kamran Pourzanjani (Bestcovery, founder of Pricegrabber), David Toomey (Cresa Partners),Andy Wilson (Innovate Pasadena, Rexter, formerly GM at Overture), plus Benjamin Kuo (socalTECH.com) -- tried to pick fifty people who represent some of the best of what the region has to offer, understanding that we're passing over many, many people who merit mention and recognition.

There are many deserving people who are not on this list -- for example, Elon Musk of SpaceX, Frank Addante of Rubicon Project, Scott Painter at TrueCar, Blaise Barrelet at Anametrix, Brian Lee at ShoeDazzle/The Honest Company, Jeff Zwelling at Convertro, and many, many others -- all of whom were nominated, and have great companies and great prospects, but are clearly not "up and coming", having successfully exited companies in the past and who are proven entrepreneurs. There are also many movers and shakers here in the industry -- Jason Nazar at
Docstoc, Ken Rutkowski of MeTAL, Mark Suster of Upfront, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo--but we had to pass them up, too, in favor of some of the new folks to the scene.

So, without further ado, here's the list of this year's 2013 Socaltech 50: